


come down and kiss me fairly

by Muccamukk



Category: Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: 5 Times, Age Difference, Fade to Black, Kissing, M/M, Missing Scene, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-24 05:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17698466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Five times Alan kissed Davie.





	come down and kiss me fairly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sanguinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/gifts).



> Title from the traditional song "Bonnie House of Airlie," which is strikingly pro-Jacobite for Davie's favourite!
> 
> Davie and Alan are having off-page sex, and Davie is seventeen. Maybe give this one a skip if that's not your cuppa. I'm also not going to even attempt the Scots dialect from the book, but please feel free to imagine it!
> 
> Thank you to Karios for beta reading.

Of the many omissions I made in my previous account of the affair with my uncle, my kidnapping, and the subsequent adventures I shared with Alan Breck—most made to protect the names of various innocent parties, and, I will admit, to save myself some embarrassment—the greatest are perhaps five kisses. Rather, for the sake of clarity, three kisses, for the first I did include, and the last happened after I concluded the narration of my adventures.

I'm write this expanded relation of events largely for my own amusement, as only one other set of eyes shall ever see it, and I am not sure how the other shall react. Nevertheless, I should like to put into writing these down fond, old memories lest time and age dull them, though now it seems that those bright moments will burn in my heart forever, the last flames to fade even as my eyes dim and my soul leaves my body. (I put these reassurances in for the other reader, who is as vain as a cock and as jealous as Medea.) I will continue my story.

The first kiss of course were those on the cheeks in the round-house of the brig _Covenant_ , when Alan seized my shoulders and pressed his lips roughly to my cheeks, first one than the other. Then he laughed and sang with such pure joy at his conquest.

I was too shocked and sickened with violence, then, to think of anything beyond the blood on the deck and the fever light in Alan's eyes. Yet as I curled on the captain's bunk, and closed my eyes against the pitching of the cabin and silhouette of Alan's coat as he stood in the door, I felt the kisses anew. Alan's lips on my cheeks, the way his nose had bumped into my cheekbones, the grip of his fingers on my shoulders as he pulled me down to his height. I rubbed my face against the pillow, as though it were still wet with anything but my tears, and then I closed my eyes and slept.

Alone on what I thought to be my island, days later, soaked and freezing, I dreamed of Alan's arms about me, and then his hands on my shoulders, fingers digging in through the rags of my coat. This time when he kissed me, it was full on the lips, and for a moment my body flooded with warmth. When I awoke alone and miserable, I grieved anew at the wreck of the _Covenant_ and the death of Alan Breck, though I dared not think what the dream might mean save that.

The second kiss, and the first I omitted, was on that great stone in the middle of the river on the first morning after our flight from Appin.

I had frozen, unable to think of moving forward or back, no matter what Alan said, no matter the brandy on my lips. Here again, Alan took my shoulders, but this time his kiss was as the one in my almost-forgotten dream, forthright and on my lips. He lingered for a moment, and then broke with me and leapt across the river, leaving me stunned, half drunk and alone on the rock.

I wanted to demand of Alan what he thought he was about, but he could not possibly hear me across the thunder of the water, so I leapt after him, and the rest went as I previously recounted. I fell; Alan caught me, and our lawless flight continued.

Later, on top of those two great rocks, I still wished to ask him what he meant by the kiss, but other matters pressed harder, and as we lay in the baking sun with redcoats on every side, I did not dare to speak. The kiss seemed almost like another dream, in any case.

We fled all that night, first crawling on our bellies and then running low through the heather. I watched Alan as a model to copy—ducking when he ducked, leaping when he lept—but also studying his scared face in the moonlight and wondering at that kiss. It seemed more real as we lay shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and I knew that I hadn't imagined it.

Yet I still did not know why the man had done it, any more than I knew why killing three men made him sing with joy when it made me weep. My Alan seemed a creature of fairie as much as a real man at times, and at those times I felt the asking would break the spell he cast.

The next morning, high in the hills in the place called the Heugh of Corrynakiegh, as we lay together under Alan's great coat upon the bed of heather, I knew that if we continued together as we had, I could no longer let it lie silent between us. I had wondered about that kiss for a full day now, and I knew the question would plague me for the rest of our days together, and perhaps all the days after, so long as we didn't hang.

Alan lay close enough that I could smell the brandy on his breath and feel the warmth of his body, even though we barely touched. I wanted him to take me in his arms as he had in the round-house, and I wanted to feel comforted as I had in my dream on the island, and I wanted something more passionately urgant that I couldn't not put into words even as the whole of my soul ached for it.

I asked Alan why he'd kissed me there on the rock.

We were lying face to face in the dim light of the cave, and his eyes had met mine when I began the question, but by the time I finished it, he made a study of the shadows on the wall behind me. "Oh," said he, "It was no great thing, save I thought it'd do me a better service than slapping you."

I had not admitted to a small glow of hope in my breast until Alan crushed it. I bit my lip to hide a sigh, and looked past Alan's shoulder to the grey cloud the clung to the entrance to our cave. I wished heartily that I'd never thought on that kiss in the round-house, much less dreamed of it. Alan and his odd Jacobite ways and all those years in France clearly made him think of a kiss as nothing. I knew that if I protested that I thought it was, or had hoped it would be, Alan would only laugh and call me Whiggish. I closed my eyes, unable to bear even the sight of his hair in the corner of my vision. It was childish to want to weep for something that had never been promised and had barely been hoped for, yet I felt my throat prickle.

"Davie," Alan said, and he touched my temple with his fingertips, and stroked back into my hair. I turned my face towards his touch, but did not open my eyes. "Is it another kiss you're asking for?"

His voice was soft, with no laughter in it, and I could not think of how we lay so close in the heather, our knees touching, and his fingers in my hair. I couldn't speak, either, so I nodded just a little and kissed the inside of his wrist.

"You know what you're about, lad?" he asked.

In truth, I did not. I was following only that memory of the warmth of the dream, and how it seemed as though I could think of nothing but the feel of his lips touching mine. I could not lie, but neither could I answer, so I held as still as a hare in the brambles and waited to see what he might do. Alan's hand stayed still in my hair, and the sound of his breathing seemed to fill the cave, to fill perhaps the whole world.

Alan kissed me. The heather rustled beneath us as he leaned in, and unlike the first two kisses, his lips touched mine but lightly. It was a mere brush, an exchange of breath more than a kiss. I let my lips part beneath his, hoping that he would continue, but he pulled away. I opened my eyes—it seemed as though I could do nothing else—and saw that he was watching me carefully, making a study of my face.

I tried to speak, but found my throat as parched as it had been upon the rocks the day before, so I swallowed and licked my lips before saying, "Yes, Alan, it's another kiss I'm asking for."

I will leave the account of the rest of the day at that, but I believe I've made it clear enough where we proceeded from there, and why we were five days in the Heugh of Corrynakiegh.

From thence we had no time for such things, for I was too tired, or too ill, or too furious with Alan to pause for kisses between Corrynakiegh and Balquhidder, and at Balquhidder too sick again. Though in my fretful dreams, I often imagined Alan's lips on mine, his hands on my skin, the heat of something sweeter than fever rising in me. I cannot say if those dreams were truth or none.

The fourth kiss came at our last meeting on the high road and the place called Rest-and-be-Thankful. We were quite alone on the hilltop road. As Alan said goodbye and our hands parted, I felt the weight of everything I was to lose, and wished that I were as brave a highland lad as Alan would have me be. I found that could say naught. My anger at Alan had long since burned away, but so too had the boldness it had lent me.

Alan had turned away already, about to leave me on that hill, but as seemed as though he could feel the longing in my gaze. He turned of a sudden moment, and moved lighting quick—quick as he did with a blade in his hand—to put his arms about me and kissed me fiercely and soundly on both cheeks and on my mouth.

I tried to cling to Alan's sleeves, but he tore away from me, and strode down the road at almost a run, leaving me standing there alone. I had to turn my back on him, lest I stay frozen in place for the rest of my days.

A week passed, and then another, and by the time the month was out, I had word that Alan had sailed for France. By then, I'd settled my affairs, moved into the house that ought to have been my father's, and begun the slow process of setting it to rights. From dawn until the last glimmer of twilight, I put my all strength into the work of rebuilding the place, and when harvest came into working the land beside my folk. At night, I fell into an exhausted sleep and dreamed of Alan.

Spring planting came, and pushed into the long days of early summer and I had little time to think of anything other than how much work it had proved to be to be a lord of the Shaws at eighteen years of age.

I came to a sweet night at the start of July before I found time to think and remember where I'd been just then the year before. Though I'd worked all day on the house's deadly tower, I was sitting up idly holding a book and listing to the sounds of the night through an open window, too tired to read, or to rise and go to bed, but satisfied in my day's work and the lassitude filling my bones.

I heard among the cries of a barn owl and the whirring beat of a woodcock taking flight, a high clear whistle. It was an old highland air, and one that I'd had running through head for almost a year now, a song I'd not heard since I'd whistled it by the roadside.

As the whistler approached the house, he changed the tune to "Bonnie House of Airlie," and before he could knock on the door, I'd already flown to my feet and flung it open before him.

"There you are, David," Alan said as he stood in a fine new French coat with new feathers in his hat, a brace of rabbits dangling from his hand.

"Here I am indeed," said I, and I stepped back to let him in. "You'll have got those off my land then."

"Well, as I have none of my own," Alan admitted, setting the rabbits on the kitchen table. "I thought I'd bring my own provender. If I'm to stay for a night or two, passing by as I am."

I would have asked him where on Earth he could be going that my house lay on his way, or how he dared show his face at all—well known and highly bountied as it was—after the death of James of the Glen, or how he could be so lordly to assume a bed in another man's house, but instead I stepped forward and leaned down to him, my lips parted.

Alan took my shoulders as he had always done, stood on his toes, and kissed me.

That is the fifth kiss I meant to write about, but I will not say it was the last of note I received or offered in the years that have passed since that summer night. Now, as I hear the whistling of a highland air outside my window, I will finish this account, and venture to see what Alan Breck might think of it.


End file.
